The Philadelphia Quarry (18 page)

She sounds as if she might be mocking me. I guess correctly that she’s talking about Wesley Simpson.

I tell Bitsy that I didn’t know he was still hearing those voices telling him to stop taking his meds and go nuts.

“I think you stop taking your meds and then you hear the voices,” Bitsy says, “but at least he didn’t stay gone long this time.”

“They’ve got him already?”

“Yeah. Lewis must have raised holy hell at some level way higher than Richmond’s finest.”

They found him in Arkansas. He was, for reasons that we’ll never know, I guess, in some town in the northeast corner of the state, Blytheville. Between the time he rented a car at the Memphis airport and the time he tried to pay for his room at a Holiday Inn, Lewis had managed to have his credit card canceled. When he made a fuss about it, they called the local cops, who found out they had a missing person, presumed dangerous, on their hands.

“Anyhow,” Bitsy says, “I think Carl was flying out to Memphis today to get him and bring him back. He’s lucky they didn’t keep him in jail. I understand he hit a cop.”

Money talks, I remind her. Then I ask her how she found all this out so quickly. I figured she’d know something about it, but not this much.

“Oh,” she says, laughing, “I have my ways. Carl Witt and my brother were in the same fraternity at U.Va. Carl called him last night and asked him to meet him for a drink or three. Carl kind of likes to drink, I think, and I imagine he felt like he needed to get away from Lewis’s ranting for a while.”

So, sometime after Sarah Goodnight was shown the door at close range yesterday, Lewis must have gotten the call from Arkansas.

“Fast work,” I say.

“Better than the last time. This time, they found the car.”

I have to ask.

“Why are you telling me all this?”

She’s uncustomarily quiet for a few seconds.

“I don’t like this,” she says at last. “I don’t like what happened to my friend, and I don’t think I like what’s happening to that man they arrested for it.”

Fair enough, I say. I’m not exactly sold on the police version of things either.

“I figure,” she goes on, “if I can shed a little sunlight on what’s happening, maybe somebody will find the truth, just lying there like a diamond amid all the broken glass.”

I tell her that’s very poetic, and then I sincerely thank her. I tell her that I’m not allowed to write about the case right now, or even to work at the newspaper, but that I’m passing my information to somebody who can help her shine truth’s own flashlight on this mess.

“You mean that girl who went to Lewis and Carl’s yesterday?”

“You do get around,” I say.

“Like I said, I have my sources.”

“Stay in touch,” I tell her, and she hangs up.

The sun is streaming in the east-facing windows. Not being able to legally drive is going to be a big problem, I can tell. It’s a good thing I live within walking distance of the newspaper (assuming I get to work there again) and right on the bus line. The hospital, where I’m eventually headed, would be a haul otherwise, and Custalow doesn’t have time to be my full-time personal chauffeur.

I’ve arranged for Kate to meet me for coffee at Perlie’s first, though, so I can probably forgo the services of our fine transit system this morning if I don’t piss my ex-wife off too much.

When she walks in, I can see she looks a little tired. She’s talking on her cellphone, as usual, as she slides into the booth, facing me. She nods slightly and holds up a finger.

“Sorry,” she says when she momentarily returns from cell-world to the one where people have face-to-face conversations. “It was Marcus. He wants us to meet with Slade today. I don’t know, Willie. It’s not looking good. But let’s talk about you. You really ought to drink less, or at home, or something.”

I concede that this is true. Protest is futile. As one of my former wives, she knows too well what alcohol, nicotine and Mr. Johnson, a.k.a Willie’s willie, have done to the general well-being of myself and those I profess to love.

We order omelets, hash browns and coffee. As we’re eating, she lays out my future. She thinks that the system won’t be overly harsh with me, but that I’m likely to be restricted to work-only driving for six months or so, in addition to making a hefty withdrawal from my not-so-hefty checking account.

“And your insurance company is going to drop you,” she adds.

“I hope I can still afford to pay the rent,” I say.

She doesn’t smile and says she hopes so, too.

She pats her mouth with her napkin, wiping a bit of egg that was stuck on her upper lip.

“You know,” she says, “you might want to think about AA.”

“Isn’t that for alcoholics?”

She gives me the thinnest smile imaginable.

She gives no indication that last Wednesday’s little afternoon delight was anything but an immediately regretted lapse in judgment and good sense. She gives her watch a surreptitious glance.

“I might have something that would make Mr. Slade’s day a little brighter,” I tell her, and Kate is suddenly all ears.

I hadn’t exactly planned to tell her, and maybe I’m telling her now just to keep her in my sight for a few more minutes, impress her with my reporterly skills.

I tell her about Bump Freeman and the phone call.

“Why the hell didn’t Slade tell us about it?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Freeman said he sounded like he was half asleep. He never came by the next day like he said he would.”

“Well, by the end of the next day, he was already in jail.”

Kate suggests that perhaps, as I have nothing else to do, I might accompany her over to the jail, where she’s supposed to meet Marcus Green. I check my watch and figure I can spare a couple of hours.

“Oh, yeah,” I tell her as she’s pulling away from the curb, “Wesley Simpson went missing. They found him somewhere in Arkansas.”

She stops, halfway out in traffic, finally moving on when the guy behind her sits on his horn. She looks at me and shakes her head.

“Any more surprises? He seemed a little spooky to me, at the funeral. Didn’t Clara say he’d done that before?”

“Yeah, but the timing’s kind of strange, and Sarah said Lewis seemed pretty upset about it.”

“Well, he is her brother. She’s running out of sibs. Who’s Sarah?”

I explain about Sarah volunteering to go to the Witts’ front door, since I was on Lewis’s shoot-to-kill list and not getting paid by the newspaper at present.

“You always were good at getting the girls to do favors,” she says.

“You’re smirking.”

“Wait, let me guess. She’s about twenty-three, blonde, pretty, looking for a mentor?”

“Wrong. She’s twenty-four.”

“Oh, Willie,” she says, using much the same tone as she did when she found out about my little DUI adventure yesterday.

At the jail, Marcus is waiting for us. Kate brings him up to speed on the five
A.M
. call. Marcus stares for a second. Then he smacks his bald, shiny head.

“He didn’t say a damn thing to me about that.”

Inside, I’m allowed to accompany Richard Slade’s crack defense team to the interview room.

Marcus cuts to the chase.

“What about that phone call Bump Freeman gave you? Were you going to tell us about that? Do you want to spend the rest of your life in prison, or worse?”

Slade looks genuinely confused.

“Five
A.M
. About the same time you were allegedly murdering Alicia Parker Simpson.”

“I—I don’t remember nothin’ like that. I mean, why wouldn’t I tell you if I remembered it?”

Something occurs to me. It’s a long shot, but that’s all we have.

“Richard,” I interrupt, “were you taking any kind of medication, like sleeping pills or something?”

He thinks for a few seconds.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he says finally. “I was kind of jazzed up, after talking to Bump and all. I guess it’s just being somewhere without bars, with cars and crickets and all. I’d mentioned it to Momma the night before, and she gave me some of her pills.”

“Do you know what it was?”

“I don’t know. Never heard of it. A-something. Amber. Amway. Something like that . . .”

“Ambien?” Kate asks.

“Yeah, that’s it! Ambien. I took one after I got back to the house.”

Kate and I exchange glances.

“What?” Marcus Green asks.

Sometime in our first two years of marriage, Kate had a bout of insomnia, and her doctor prescribed Ambien.

One night, she’d fallen asleep before me. Sometime after one, the phone rang, and I answered it. It was Kate’s mother, and it was serious. It’s always serious that time of night. Kate’s father was having chest pains. She was calling from the emergency room. Kate must have talked with her for five minutes, and then hung up. She told me her father was stable, and that there wasn’t any reason to rush to the hospital. I should’ve made her go right then, but I didn’t. Five minutes later, Kate was asleep again.

When I woke up at seven to take a piss, I thought I’d better wake Kate, too. I was sure she’d want to get over to the hospital right away.

I had to shake her a couple of times before she opened her eyes.

“Shouldn’t you get up, sweetie?” I asked. “Your mom’s probably waiting for you.”

“What?”

“At the hospital.”

“Hospital?”

She didn’t remember a damn thing. She was mortified that she hadn’t rushed right over when she got the call she didn’t remember getting, and she never took Ambien again.

Kate explains that it is possible to do things under the influence of some of our finer sleep-inducing drugs and then not remember them later.

“So,” Richard Slade says, not quite seeming to believe it, “I could have talked to Bump and not even remembered it?”

Kate tells him that’s so.

“Damn.”

Of course, I’m wondering what else you could do under the influence of Ambien and not remember, but keep it to myself.

We talk a bit more, and then the three of us leave.

“In the future,” Marcus tells me, “you might want to keep us informed on shit like this.”

“When I’m working for you,” I tell him, “I might do that.”

I get a call from Sarah while Kate’s driving me to the paper.

“You might want to be here for this,” she says. “Wheelie’s about to fire Mark.”

“He’s going to can Baer?”

As much as I have grown to dislike the guy who seems to be permanently affixed to my coattails, this doesn’t seem right. Baer’s sucked up enough to Wheelie, Grubby and anybody else in a suit to be fireproof. Or so I thought.

“Why?”

“Oh, he put something on his blog about Wesley Simpson going missing. It wasn’t much, just a couple of paragraphs.”

I guess that somewhere deep inside Baer’s upwardly mobile DNA a few strands of journalist exist. He couldn’t resist the urge to print—or at least commit to the ether—the truth.

“I tried to stop him,” Sarah says, and I’m depressed by how upset she sounds. Not that it’s any of my business. Right.

I ask Kate to drop me by the paper.

“More news to hoard?” she says.

“Nothing new. It’s just that half the town probably knows about Wes Simpson by now.”

“I hope this doesn’t get your little mentee in trouble.”

She’s definitely smirking now.

“Just because you imagine it,” I say, “doesn’t mean it’s so.”

We’re at the paper. I get out of the car. I should just keep walking, but I walk around to her side and ask what I think is a pertinent question:

“Besides, what’s it to you?”

The sparsely populated newsroom is quiet. A couple of the features reporters look kind of lonely.

“They’re up in Grubby’s office,” Sarah tells me when I reach her desk.

Upstairs, Sandy McCool is her usual poker-faced self. When she informs me that Grubby’s in a meeting, I tell her I know, that I’m there for the meeting, too.

“I don’t think so,” she says.

I like Sandy. She’s a pro. But when I realize that I’m three steps closer to Grubby’s office than she is, and when I further deduce that it’s unlikely Grubby has locked his door, I spring into action, spring being a relative word. At any rate, I’m able to beat Sandy to the publisher’s Holy of Holies and step in unannounced and very definitely uninvited. I’m only slightly winded.

Baer is there, with Wheelie sitting beside him. Our managing editor looks decidedly uncomfortable. He’ll probably be splattered with some of the blame for the unfortunate blog that no doubt has already elicited a call from Giles Whitehurst or perhaps Lewis Witt herself. Baer looks nervous. This won’t look good on his résumé. It’s much easier to get a job at the
Post
if you haven’t just been fired.

James H. Grubbs, who sits facing them, picks up the phone as if to call security. He holds the receiver a foot or so in the air, then sets it down.

“Willie,” he says. “I should have known you had a hand in this. Do you really want to make that suspension permanent?”

I assure Grubby that this is not my fondest wish, but that there is more to the story than even the doughty Mr. Baer knows.

“I don’t really care how much of the story there is,” Grubby says. “The story does not exist. Until Richard Slade’s trial, there is no story. Period.”

“Maybe you don’t care, then, that Wesley Simpson’s already been found and is, as we speak, headed back to Richmond.”

“I know that,” Grubby says, confirming what I already pretty much knew: Either our board chairman or Lewis Witt has been lighting his ass up already.

Might as well take a chance.

“There are a few things that you probably don’t know.”

Grubby is silent.

“When we found out Wesley Simpson was missing, I knew that I wasn’t allowed to put anything on my blog, so I convinced Baer to let me put it on his.”

Baer looks like he wants to refute this for a half-second, not enough time for either of my bosses to notice. Then Baer, quick learner that he is, closes his mouth.

“He didn’t know how much of a shitstorm this would kick up,” I add. “I just told him we wanted to see if we could ferret out the truth.”

“The truth,” Grubby says, as if it’s an obscenity. “The truth is, I’ll give you a one-minute head start before security comes and has you arrested for trespassing in my office.”